Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

Magorn:Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

What I always wonder is how much of Apple's success was his doing? Like you said, a lot of the best stuff came from other places. I mean to say, it didn't spring solely from his mind.Likewise, did he just walk in one day and say, "We're going to make an MP3 player. I think we should call it the iPod." Or did they have some brainstorming meeting and some random jackoff said, "Hmm, music is really hot right now. What about some sort of portable music player?" And the rest grew from that.

Look at any other company. It's rare for all the ideas to come from a single person. There's no one person at Microsoft doing ALL the design work for Windows. There's no one person at GM designing all the car bodies or engines, etc.

Magorn:Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

Apple paid Xerox for the technology in Apple stock.

/the rest of your comment is also complete shiat but that bit of revisionist history always annoyed me

Magorn:he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine?

You mean the NeXT machine whose operating system (NeXTstep), API (OPENSTEP), and compiler (Objective-C, albeit licensed) form the basis for Mac OS X and iOS, i.e. all of Apple's modern products? There was a reason why they brought Jobs back, you know.

Honest Bender:Likewise, did he just walk in one day and say, "We're going to make an MP3 player. I think we should call it the iPod." Or did they have some brainstorming meeting and some random jackoff said, "Hmm, music is really hot right now. What about some sort of portable music player?" And the rest grew from that.

Neither. It came from the fact that their was a new type of hard drive and Tony Fadell said why don't we make a MP3 player? And they did. The same goes for the iPhone. They also played around with touch screen technology to make a tablet but technology wasn't ready - but for a phone it was.

Honest Bender:Look at any other company. It's rare for all the ideas to come from a single person. There's no one person at Microsoft doing ALL the design work for Windows. There's no one person at GM designing all the car bodies or engines, etc.

Neither Microsoft or GM come to mind when I think of great ideas or products.

Honest Bender:Magorn: Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

What I always wonder is how much of Apple's success was his doing? Like you said, a lot of the best stuff came from other places. I mean to say, it didn't spring solely from his mind.Likewise, did he just walk in one day and say, "We're going to make an MP3 player. I think we should call it the iPod." Or did they have some brainstorming meeting and some random jackoff said, "Hmm, music is really hot right now. What about some sort of portable music player?" And the rest grew from that.

Look at any other company. It's rare for all the ideas to come from a single person. There's no one person at Microsoft doing ALL the design work for Windows. There's no one person at GM designing all the car bodies or engines, etc.

So why do we give Steve Jobs sole credit for making Apple great?

I guess because he created a "brand" out of Apple. He and his marketing people were amazing, apparently.

Windows is just that OS that you get on nearly every single computer standard. You pay specifically for "Apple".

Ambitwistor:Magorn: he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine?

You mean the NeXT machine whose operating system (NeXTstep), API (OPENSTEP), and compiler (Objective-C, albeit licensed) form the basis for Mac OS X and iOS, i.e. all of Apple's modern products? There was a reason why they brought Jobs back, you know.

I think that the point still stands. NeXT OS was brilliant, but the machine itself was way, way over-designed. I worked in a company that was selling them (or trying to), and every customer we approached wondered why they needed a glorified server in a magnesium case when Sun had solutions for half the cost.

Waldo Pepper:Honest Bender: Magorn: Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

What I always wonder is how much of Apple's success was his doing? Like you said, a lot of the best stuff came from other places. I mean to say, it didn't spring solely from his mind.Likewise, did he just walk in one day and say, "We're going to make an MP3 player. I think we should call it the iPod." Or did they have some brainstorming meeting and some random jackoff said, "Hmm, music is really hot right now. What about some sort of portable music player?" And the rest grew from that.

Look at any other company. It's rare for all the ideas to come from a single person. There's no one person at Microsoft doing ALL the design work for Windows. There's no one person at GM designing all the car bodies or engines, etc.

So why do we give Steve Jobs sole credit for making Apple great?

Did not the Mac and Jobs love of fonts/type help pushed the desktop publishing revolution?

I'm a Graphic Designer and it did make font programs and publishing more accessible to the consumer, a lot of early 90s innovations were due to Photoshop and Fontographer (or whatever they were using). I think it would've happened anyway, no matter who promoted it, but I think Steve is responsible for it happening when it did. Who knows? Without that, the ebook, iPad and other stuff could've been pushed back a year or two?

Magorn:Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

Nice. Just enough factual twisting to set people off. You'll get some interesting bites I'm sure.

Ambitwistor:Magorn: he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine?

You mean the NeXT machine whose operating system (NeXTstep), API (OPENSTEP), and compiler (Objective-C, albeit licensed) form the basis for Mac OS X and iOS, i.e. all of Apple's modern products? There was a reason why they brought Jobs back, you know.

which didn;t stop it from being an utter and abject failure on the market. It was all the worst things about Jobs in a box basically. It LOOKED beautiful, but it was overpriced for its power, had almost no software support, didn;t have a floppy drive when that was the primary method of loading programs and files into a computer (because fark you, that's why) and in the final analysis ran what was just a glorified Unix shell

Magorn:which didn;t stop it from being an utter and abject failure on the market.

The NeXT hardware never got anywhere, but the NeXT company became profitable once they focused on enterprise software solutions, albeit not hugely so (~$1M/yr). And my original point still stands: regardless of how the NeXT boxes sold, selling its tech and staff for >$400M, which subsequently underlied the whole product line of what became the largest U.S. company in history (by market cap), isn't a failure.

Some 'Splainin' To Do:I worked in a company that was selling them (or trying to), and every customer we approached wondered why they needed a glorified server in a magnesium case when Sun had solutions for half the cost.

CSB time: Around 1996 I was working at a place that was buying Sun workstations by the butt-load. We were doing calculations and lotsa data, among other things. For data acquisition we had some decent PCs costing about 1/5th of the Suns, and I also found them easier to set up the calcs on. So I did some benchmarking. One mistake everyone was making was running the calc on the remote system and keeping their data local. I found it was like 8x faster to run on the local processor. Even better, the same calcs on the PCs were only 20% or so slower. Difference between 4 and 5 minutes, we spent way more time analyzing the results and preparing for the next calc. So I presented all this to a group of 20 or so senior people. No one cared. They wanted to spend the money while they had it, and I didn't immediately have a plan to waste the $400,000 we would save not buying more Suns. Most people totally ignored me about the remote thing too, because they wanted to let the calcs run over lunch and stuff, looked more productive. Pretty sure a big part of it was looks too, they wanted every lab and office to have Suns, and prolly the network guys liked them better because Solaris. Left that joke place about a year later, not sure why it took me that long.

Honest Bender:What I always wonder is how much of Apple's success was his doing? Like you said, a lot of the best stuff came from other places. I mean to say, it didn't spring solely from his mind.Likewise, did he just walk in one day and say, "We're going to make an MP3 player. I think we should call it the iPod." Or did they have some brainstorming meeting and some random jackoff said, "Hmm, music is really hot right now. What about some sort of portable music player?" And the rest grew from that.

"Creative has some really cool devices, I bet we could make one of those and market it better."

gingerjet:Magorn: Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

Apple paid Xerox for the technology in Apple stock.

/the rest of your comment is also complete shiat but that bit of revisionist history always annoyed me

Let's see if he is willing to acknowledge that the entire technical basis for Windows was stolen from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The difference being, Microsoft didn't offer DEC money up front in exchange for their technology.

They just hired one of DEC's most important OS designers and stole it.

Apple had always planned to sell the Mac for about a thousand bucks cheaper.

However, Steve wanted this huge marketing push including that very expensive Superbowl ad that didn't even show the product. Sculley was willing to go along with that, but only if they jacked the price of the product up by 40%.

In the very short term, they had huge profits, since the computer was designed to be profitable even without that extra 40% margin.

In the long term, the unnecessarily stunted sales led to there not being a large enough market for third party software. When you are creating a new software ecosystem, you desperately need a large enough consumer base to lure in third party developers and have their efforts be profitable right from the start.

Intentionally pricing the first Mac so far out of the market was a huge mistake on both Sculley and Jobs' part. Look at how successful Google's Nexus 7 was at getting people to take Android on a tablet seriously.

Meanwhile, after months of 'AAPL is down now but just wait until they announce the new iphone' comments the broad market is decidedly up today with aapl in a -2% countertrend as the market yawns at the new offerings.

JohnBigBootay:Meanwhile, after months of 'AAPL is down now but just wait until they announce the new iphone' comments the broad market is decidedly up today with aapl in a -2% countertrend as the market yawns at the new offerings.

every year they don't announce a full-on Apple TV with revolutionary digital programming packages people get disappointed

JohnBigBootay:Meanwhile, after months of 'AAPL is down now but just wait until they announce the new iphone' comments the broad market is decidedly up today with aapl in a -2% countertrend as the market yawns at the new offerings.

It's more been "wait until they announce the new revolutionary iPhone or some other iProduct." Not just wait for the next product cycle. They didn't do that today with the phone, and there's no new tablet TV, watch or whatever to get excited over, thus the market yawns.

Though I'll give them credit the thumbprint scan thing is kinda cool. Not "Give up Android and go back to Apple cool" but cool all the same.

BullBearMS:Let's see if he is willing to acknowledge that the entire technical basis for Windows was stolen from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The difference being, Microsoft didn't offer DEC money up front in exchange for their technology.

They just hired one of DEC's most important OS designers and stole it.

... well, the parts that they didn't steal from IBM, anyway.But Dave Cutler was given the option to build a completely new operating system using the lessons he had learned from working on VMS. That's not exactly a job offer that comes knocking every day.

likefunbutnot:BullBearMS: Let's see if he is willing to acknowledge that the entire technical basis for Windows was stolen from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The difference being, Microsoft didn't offer DEC money up front in exchange for their technology.

They just hired one of DEC's most important OS designers and stole it.

... well, the parts that they didn't steal from IBM, anyway.But Dave Cutler was given the option to build a completely new operating system using the lessons he had learned from working on VMS. That's not exactly a job offer that comes knocking every day.

First. Dave Cutler is awesome, and Windows took a turn for the worse after Windows 2000/XP when he was no longer directly in charge. Vista anyone?

Second. Windows NT was not so much "inspired" by work he did at DEC as "directly lifted" from work he did at DEC.

I worked at a major technology company that made cell phones. If I had walked up to management and given them the blueprints and source code for the iPhone in 2006, they would have told me to quit wasting time and get back to work.

Jobs wasn't brilliant because he came up with the ideas. He was brilliant because he knew a good idea when he saw one, and was a perfectionist about a good customer experience.

BullBearMS:likefunbutnot: BullBearMS: Let's see if he is willing to acknowledge that the entire technical basis for Windows was stolen from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The difference being, Microsoft didn't offer DEC money up front in exchange for their technology.

They just hired one of DEC's most important OS designers and stole it.

... well, the parts that they didn't steal from IBM, anyway.But Dave Cutler was given the option to build a completely new operating system using the lessons he had learned from working on VMS. That's not exactly a job offer that comes knocking every day.

First. Dave Cutler is awesome, and Windows took a turn for the worse after Windows 2000/XP when he was no longer directly in charge. Vista anyone?

Second. Windows NT was not so much "inspired" by work he did at DEC as "directly lifted" from work he did at DEC.

You can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms.

Well when you hire the just fired Cutler and 20 guys from his former crew, you might get some crossover in development.

BullBearMS:gingerjet: Magorn: Thing was Sculley WAS right, the Mac was a dog and no amount of lipstick was gonna fix that. And I've always felt that Job's supposed "genius" was wildly overblown, he has failed at nearly everything he tried to do. The Mac Lisa? The Next machine? yes the Apple and the Apple II weren;t bad but those were really Woz's idea not his. He stole GUi from Xerox Parc. So pretty much the only thing he did well was re-package his computers and later Mp3 player in a way that made people go "oooh Pretty!" and pay 2x as much for them on that basis

Apple paid Xerox for the technology in Apple stock.

/the rest of your comment is also complete shiat but that bit of revisionist history always annoyed me

Let's see if he is willing to acknowledge that the entire technical basis for Windows was stolen from Digital Equipment Corporation.

The difference being, Microsoft didn't offer DEC money up front in exchange for their technology.

They just hired one of DEC's most important OS designers and stole it.

And the money was basically stolen from IBM. The bedrock of Microsoft's success was pure luck and iron-clad contracts. When they're forced to actually innovate, they fail often and hard.

Sculley isn't without qualification to comment abut innovation, he missed on getting a patent for color TV when he was a teenager. Who got their first? RCA. Yeah a teenage Sculley had figured the trinitron color TV set up at the same time as RCA did. And he missed being first to file for the patent by a matter of days.

BullBearMS:Second. Windows NT was not so much "inspired" by work he did at DEC as "directly lifted" from work he did at DEC.

NT was supposed to be a lot closer to VMS, at least in terms of technical details, than it ended up being. I remember reading years and years back that Cutler was apparently told he'd get to develop an OS that would have all the stuff he was used to with VMS and then more. Then he gets to MS and he finds out, that's not really going to be the case.

DEC had a very fast, very expensive CPU it was developing at the time, one that ultimately ran native Win32 code (I'm given to understand Windows 2000/Alpha was at least compiled, just never released). It also had a personal computer business that largely relied on Microsoft products. And, being software, there's always the primary matter of proving that code was in fact stolen.

This is a really silly thing to be upset about. Cutler was the architect one way or the other and he was compensated for his work. I have no idea what kind of arrangement was made with DEC; for all we know getting those rights could've been in some random IP swap and/or a wager on a friendly game of golf between a couple C-level executives.

likefunbutnot:This is a really silly thing to be upset about. Cutler was the architect one way or the other and he was compensated for his work. I have no idea what kind of arrangement was made with DEC; for all we know getting those rights could've been in some random IP swap and/or a wager on a friendly game of golf between a couple C-level executives.

I'm not upset.

Also, we do know what happened. Microsoft had to cut DEC a really big check when DEC figured out what Microsoft had done.

My point is that it's pretty retarded for people to go on and on about how Apple stole everything from Xerox when Apple asked permission up front to be shown what Xerox was doing at PARC and paid up front for the privilege.

Meanwhile, the same misinformed idiots never seem to bring up the fact that Microsoft outright stole DEC's OS without paying a dime till the courts forced them to.

Galius_Persnickety:Jobs wasn't brilliant because he came up with the ideas. He was brilliant because he knew a good idea when he saw one, and was a perfectionist about a good customer experience.

I agree with that. The best things about Jobs was his singular vision and passion. That was also his biggest weakness, that probably was what ultimately led to him being fired. His years in the wilderness with NeXt and Pixar were productive, though. NeXt because the failure to take off meant he had to learn how to market what was cool. Pixar was the culmination of that.

The modern Apple, that Steve rebuilt, can probably be best described as an synthesis of the old Apple, NeXt and Pixar.

Everything *remarkable* that either Jobs or Gates both ever did was to steal from OS/2 Warp. And from Atari,Amiga, and everyone else in the marketplace during the formative years. Even the basic GUI was stolen tech. Beta was better than VHS, too. Get off of my lawn.

I'm sorry, but I'll draw the line at this "Beta was better" crap. No, it wasn't. In spite of the quality of the image, the big problem with Beta was that it was too short to make decent length recordings. The Betamax units that consumers got could only record about one hour of film, compared to 2+ hours for VHS. So that meant that VHS was already going to be the preferred standard for movie rentals, as well as allowing consumers to record sports games without getting cut off.

IMO, Betamax shot itself in the foot by releasing a product that would only appeal to AV geeks who cared about nominal differences in picture quality when most consumers only wanted the picture quality to be good enough. When video-rental stores chose to stock VHS over beta (because, most movies are longer than an hour), that was the end of it.